Camille Pissarro (French, 1830–1903)
The Poultry Market at Pontoise, 1882
Oil on canvas
Norton Simon Art Foundation, M.1984.2.P

In 19th-century France, increased political interest in rural labor led artists such as Camille Pissarro to explore the experiences of those who cultivated and sold food. Market paintings, especially those set in the city of Pontoise, occupied Pissarro for most of his career. Pontoise sat at the nexus of rivers that were central to the distribution of agricultural products in northern France, and its large and varied markets were considered must-sees in 19th-century tourist guidebooks. Here, The Poultry Market at Pontoise positions the viewer as a shopper, enveloped by the crowd, rather than as an outside observer. As a critic of capitalism and mass production, Pissarro celebrates the social interactions of the marketplace over its wares, and only a basket of eggs and a few ducks in the corners indicate the vendors’ specialties.

Pissarro’s numerous images of markets often center on paysannes, or female agricultural workers. In The Poultry Market we look over the shoulder of a woman in a red headscarf, surveying the scene with her hand on her hip. Her pose echoes those of two women in Pissarro’s etching Marché de Pontoise of 1888, which similarly invites the viewer to see the marketplace from their perspective (Figure 11). Pissarro followed the trend among 19th-century French male artists and intellectuals to romanticize the figure of the paysanne as the antithesis of the Parisienne, who was often stereotyped as bourgeois, jaded and fashion-obsessed.

Pissarro’s artistic investigations of rural life led critics to refer to him as the “cabbage painter.” The metaphor was used in different ways—either to dismiss him as a painter of low-life subjects or to commend the “freshness” of his paintings, which some of his supporters described as even beneficial to one’s health through visual consumption.